The medical, insurance and pharmaceudical corporations have contributed more than $708,000 to Obama between 2001 and 2006 according to the Center for Responsible Politics. Does this play a part in his Health Care Plan program?
The False Hope of the Obama Plan
According to Dr. John Geyman, the former chair of family medicine at the University of Washington and author of "Do Not Resuscitate: Why the Health Insurance Industry is Dying, and How We Must Replace it." Geyman says, "We cannot build on or tweak the present system. Different states have tried this. The problem is the private insurance industry itself....Its administrative costs are five to eight times higher than public financing through Medicare. It cares more about its shareholders than its enrollees or patients."
Obama and HR 676, the Single Payer Plan
Obama did not support HR 676, the single payer legislation for obvious reasons as health care industry vigorously fought it through campaign contributions and armies of lobbyists. Single payer health care is an American term describing the payment for doctors, hospitals and other providers of health care from a single fund. Medicare for the elderly and disabled are single-payer systems. But Medicare does not make campaign contributions.
According to Dr. Stephanie Woolhandler, one of the founders of Physicians for a National Health Insurance Program, " The pharmaceutical companies are afraid that a national health program will, as in Canada, be able to negotiate lower drug prices. Canadians pay 40 percent less for their drugs. We see on a smaller scale in the United States, where the Department of Defense is able to negotiate pharmaceutical prices that are 40 percent lower."
Obama's Health Care Plan
Obama's plan would not cover all Americans. Unlike Canada, citizens would not be enrolled in the plan automatically. Americans would have to go looking for a plan they could afford. According to Dr. Woolhandler, that would leave tens of millions who would remain uninsured under the Obama's plan.
Obama's idea is to have the government absorb severe costs, although he has not spelled out the details or where the funds would come from. He maintains that all children would have health insurance, that Medicare and Medicare-like coverage would protect the very young and elderly. The problem lies in the fact that our health industry runs on profit. The overhead for traditional Medicare is 3%, and the over head for the investment owned companies is 26.5%. Thirty-one percent of American health care expenditures is spend on administrative costs.
Obama Health Care Plan and Small Business
Obama's economic plan also includes a "pay or play' mandate requiring companies to either pay for health insurance for 100 percent of their full-time employees or pay 6% of their total payroll into a federally designed fund. According to Ralph R. Reiland, "Obama vs Business & Jobs" (Pittsburgh Tribune Review (10/13/2008), small employers currently face average costs of $7,600 per year insurance coverage for an employee with a family. For a small business with thin margins that can afford to cover only 10 of its 50 employees, Obama's full-coverage mandate under the "play" option, at $7,600 per employee, comes with a job-killing price tag of $304,000 per year for the coverage of the other 40 employees.
Obama's health care plan is a threat to not only small business employers, but the employees as well. At the same time, it still leaves millions of Americans uninsured or under insured while being a thinly disguised tax plan.
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